As the complexity and throughput of application environments has increased, the technical challenges present in the monitoring, maintenance and administration of such application environments have also substantially increased. These technical challenges are particularly acute in enterprise application environments and Web-based (e.g., Application Service Provider (ASP)) environments, which may include a large number of applications servicing a large number of users and handling a large number of transactions. Consider, for example, a popular Web site that may be serviced by a rich application environment, including a large number of applications hosted on a collection of respective application servers. Such an application environment may include hundreds of diverse and heterogeneous applications, and may be required to handle millions of Uniform Resource Location (URL) requests, millions of e-mail messages, and billions of database inquiries (e.g., utilizing SQL statements) in a 24-hour period.
A failure in such an application environment can be disastrous, particularly where the application environment supports a live and real-time service (e.g., online or network-base commerce). The ability to monitor and quickly identify problems that may arise within an application environment is of course important for a number of reasons, and presents a number of technical challenges.